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Abstract

We were teaching that year, a subject called 'Writing Self, Writing Place'. And at the end of that, we took students, I took students in a very different direction from what you would expect writing to be. I spoke about writings with storytelling, and the telling of stories, and some of them was on country, about country, about crocodiles-baru I think they call it, up there in the Northern Territory. JEN:We used the essay of Val Plumwood's called 'Being Prey', about her experience of being a white person on country, on country that has law that she's not fully conscious of, or that she doesn't fully want to listen to, and of being attacked by a crocodile on that country.PAUL: Three times that crocodile took her down, spat her out. Third time he spat her towards the bank. She crawls up the bank in the dark and lays there expecting to die I reckon. But she was found and the rest of her life was spent wondering why she survived. And I think I remember you saying once that when she was asked, why do you think he let you go, why do you think that crocodile let you go? She said, all I can remember is that it was cloudy that day. You know, I think it was because the animal was juvenile, but I wouldn't imagine crocodiles play for fun. JEN: No.PAUL: So, if they do, that's something we don't know. JEN: Yeah. I mean the whole encounter kind of takes you into the unknown doesn't it? PAUL: Yeah.JEN: I remember when we decided to use that piece of writing, I'd read it a couple of times before, and maybe we'd even taught it before, but at some point those words that we've used at the beginning of the poem really stuck in me. They began to seem like an expression of something that could reach across and give or express some apprehension of how horrific the grip of colonisation and those experiences were, and are, for Indigenous people. They could carry across something about those experiences of the massacres, although I don't know that Val Plumwood was consciously writing to resonate with that. Still there's a resonant expression there of the pain and the terror. PAUL: Well, exactly. And it's also about place. She's told not to go to that place. But still she went. JEN: Yeah.PAUL: She's intrepid about being in the bush alone. She said, I've done this many times. She didn't do it any more times after that, but her paper spoke about prey, about being prey. JEN: Yeah.PAUL: Not only in the reader's place, in their heart, but on the page itself. As I said, from the beginning to that end of the part where I say Barkindji, there's a very different voice that ends there, that started with 'reconcile that' as a 'stick it up your arse' thing, you know. Jen:That's right. Because it comes into this conversation that comes back around. The hole in the fabric, or the hole in the flesh, it's not just left there. PAUL: Well, I know that place changes voice, and voice changes in different places. I've often thought of this, you know. Whether I could have written those words out there at Toorale, where those bones are. What other voice would it ...